A Comprehensive Guide to Running a Successful Design Contest Online

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Introduction

Running design contests can benefit your blog. Your design blog is a community and the members of your community appreciate having the chance to win prizes and gain exposure from winning. It gives younger designers the opportunity to participate and be a part of the process as well. Running a design contest is a great way to get involvement in your design community.

There are quite a few things to consider when running a contest. Let's take a look at both the important areas of consideration and the details. After reading this post you'll have the information you need to run a successful design contest.

Focus on Community Building

Keep your community members in mind when deciding on a contest focus. What type of contest would they most want to participate in. Consider running a blog post that asks this question. Of course, this approach is most helpful if you have a large group of active commenters on your blog.

Here is a post over at PSDTUTS that asks for reader feedback on what readers think would make a great contest. The responses are many and varied. You could also compile the top responses (and your own as well) into a short list. Then run a survey to help decide the contest focus. This leverages the community and gets members involved. Keep in mind though, if you have a killer contest idea, run with it.

Decide on a Great Contest Topic

Part of driving contest participation is a great contest topic. Make it something fun that your audience will want to take part in. You many stumble upon a unique contest topic that's just perfect for your blog in your brainstorming session. Also, you may find it helpful to gain inspiration from other successful design contests.

Veerle ran a really successful poster design contest. Part of what made that contest so successful is that there was a strong concept that made designers want to participate. She asked designers to answer the question, "What is Graphic Design?" The concept was so successful that the Flickr pool for this contest has been opened up again, so designers can continue to explore this topic.

The concept first shows up in a blog post here. Then it turns into the What is Graphic Design Poster Competition. An update to the contest is here. The contest results are located in this post. While the contest was running, it was being linked to all over the graphic design blog community. This was a great design contest.

Offer Big Value Prizes

Part of driving contest participation is the spoils. The more prizes you offer and the larger monetary worth they have the more participation you'll see in the contest. Cash is great and will certainly drive participation. Also, consider the rarity of what you're offering. A unique item could certainly drive participation.

Approaching companies to gather prizes is easier than you think. First of all, have your contest organized. Make it easy to explain in a paragraph. Put together all the benefits of your blog. The higher your blog's traffic and the more active your audiences participation, the easier it will be to gain sponsors. Draft a concise and professional email and send it to the right contact person at the company.

Contact both smaller companies and larger prestigious companies. Play the numbers. Also, if you plan on running another contest, then have an easy way to encourage sponsors to contact you in the contest articles you post.

You the Designer has a multi-part contest with a big value prize. You can win a featured full page spot in Print Magazine. This is a prize that doesn't have a monetary worth, but does have a high value. The winner will receive great exposure in a high quality design magazine. Gino put together some great prizes for this contest.

Leverage the Power of Prestige

It isn't only the prize that drives participation, but the prestige of winning. The more competitors there are, the higher the honor of winning. Also, the more quality design entries in the contest, the greater winning feels. Large blogs and popular web communities certainly benefit from prestige. Designer's may even place this on their resume's and put the winning design in their portfolios.

Post the winning entries on your blog. Also, periodically post some of the top entries in the contest. This gives participants something to shoot for even when they don't win. Being promoted within their community is great.

Smashing Magazine has run several successful design contests. The Smashing Header Graphics Contest showcased the winning entries as free downloads. There were some great prizes, but the predominant drive in the success of this contest was being featured on Smashing Magazine. Smashing gave away the prizes randomly, rather than to the best entries. The contest winners announcement post is located here.

Set Guidelines, Deadlines, and Rules for the Contest

Deadlines are critical to a successful contest. Participants need to know the date the contest starts, and the last day they can place entries. Entrants need to know how long they have to enter the contest. Typically, 2-4 weeks is a good length for a successful design contest. This time frame is long enough for entrants to make something good, but short enough that there is some immediacy to the pace of the contest.

Set clear guidelines on what is being made. Clarify exactly what should be entered in the contest. The audience should know in one or two sentences what they should be making for the contest. Be clear about artwork format. Consider the sizes that can be entered. For example, a wallpaper contest has specific dimensions. You should state what are acceptable dimensions for artwork.

Be sure to mention the number of entries participants can place. You may choose to limit the amount, or set it to unlimited. If you don't make this clear, then this question will come up.

Support and Promote the Contest

A good contest is run well. The contest holder answers all the question received through email and that appear in comments. The better you support the contest, the more it will thrive. Also, you can tie in posts about the contest as well.

If it's a contest on designing a movie poster, then write an inspirational post that showcases great examples of movie posters across the net. This helps support the contest and inspire participation. It gives great artwork examples for those entering the contest to learn from. Tutorials on the topic might be relevant support posts. Use your imagination to support and encourage participation.

You may also want to contact other design blogs about mentioning the contest on their site, or promote the contest in graphic design forums.

Another way to look at promotion is the idea that the contest itself can promote a topic on your blog, a feature of your blog, or your community in some way. Abduzeedo ran a contest on designing the Abduzeedo Flickr Pool logo. You can see the winning entry here or visit Abduzeedo's Flickr Pool to see the icon in action. This contest certainly promotes the Flickr pool for that site.

Utilize Free Resources

A common way to run a graphic design contest is to leverage the resources available at Flickr. First, you may want to form a group for your blog. This gives your community a place to put artwork relevant to your community. You could create a separate group pool just for the contest or use a unique tag for that contest. This allows both participants and you running the contest to see all the contest entries easily.

All About the Flow of Running the Contest

There is a flow to running a design contest. Let's take a look at it from concept creation and contest launch all the way through to choosing the winners and delivering prizes.

Prelaunch

• Brainstorm Ideas for Your Contest - You can do this yourself or leverage your community for ideas for a contest.
• Decide on Your Contest Topic - Decide what your contest will be about. Make it something great.
• Prepare for the Contest - Put together all the rules and guidelines for the contest. Make sure you have your Flickr group and any other resources you'll be utilizing ready before launch.
• Put Together the Prizes - Decide the prizes you'll be offering and have them ready to go.
• Promote the Contest - You may want to promote the contest on other blogs or in design forums to generate more participation in the contest. This is best done early in the contest. You may decide on a prelaunch promotional strategy. Otherwise, work it in as early as possible in the contest.

Launch

• Launch the Contest - Place a blog post that comprehensively lists the contest's focus, rules, and guidelines. Prominently promote your prizes and sponsors. Generate an appropriate level of buzz in the announcement.
• Answer all Questions - Be sure to check the comments and your email, especially during the first 24 hours after contest launch, as the bulk of questions will come up right away.

Supporting the Contest

• Post Updates - As the contest progresses periodically post articles that update the progress of the contest. This is a chance to showcase some of the best work submitted in the contest. If your contest spans an entire month, than you may have as many as 3 or 4 posts updating the contest. Do as many as feels right for your contest.
• News - If any new sponsors come on board, then tie this into a news update. Promote the new prizes in this update. This is an excellent way to generate more buzz about the contest and keep everybody interested. Also, do follow up if any issues come up that contestants need to be aware of.

Announcing the Winners and Post Launch

• Announce the Winners - At the very least you'd want to state who the winners are and link to their winning entries. Typically, you'd be placing copies of the winning entries in the blog post as well.
• Promote the Best Entries - You may want to do more than announce the winners. You could also tell something about the winners. Give them a chance to promote something about themselves. You could also make this a big blog post and point out a bunch of great contest entries that didn't win, but were best of show.

Wrapping up the Contest

• Helping the Winners Collect their Prizes - Keep in mind when the contest finishes you need to help the winners collect their prizes. When cash or products are the prizes this is fairly clear how to do this. With helping winners collect on services, mostly you'll be putting the winners in touch with the company offering the service.
• Toward the Future - You may find ways to leverage the success of your contest by writing about it again in the future. Even after the contest is finished, you may find ways to discuss it again in future blog posts. This is something to keep in mind. Also, you could use the success of your first contest to launch another even better one.

Improving PSDTUTS Contests

We're on our second contest now over at PSDTUTS, and it's going great. The first contest went well, but this second contest is even better. A few things are making this second contest better than the first.

The first PSDTUTS contest had a topic that was a bit complicated. It required that participants utilize what they had learned in tutorials at PSDTUTS. This concept was interesting, but difficult to demonstrate for some participants. The second PSDTUTS contest has a really clear topic. It's easy to understand and fun. The second contest is about creating a Desktop Wallpaper for the new AudioJungle site. This is a fun and tangible concept. It's clear to the participants what format to design in.

The second contest has bigger prizes. We're offering more cash and prizes in the second contest. This certainly helps to drive participation.

There are some logistical improvements in the second contest. We've streamlined some posts. This allows me to do things like cut and paste the sponsor's section into any update. This saves time and gives a standardized way that sponsors are promoted. They each get a 468px by 90px banner. We also encourage sponsors to contact us at the end of every update. This has led to new sponsors contacting us.

We've improved the rules and guidelines. This offers more clarity on what is acceptable for entrants. Exactly how they can take their prizes. This way the participant expectations are clear. Also, it improves the professionalism of the contest.

The addition of using a specific Tag in Flickr is a big improvement in running the contest. Here is the audiojungle tag that organizes the second contest entries. It was time-consuming having to go through the entire PSDTUTS pool trying to find the contest entries in the first PSDTUTS contest. I highly recommend using a unique tag when running a design contest that uses Flickr. It keeps all the entries organized well. Anything that streamlines the contest and makes it easier to run will lead to more success.

Conclusion

I'll probably write on this topic again in the future, as we're planning on running more contests over at PSDTUTS.

I also want to run a contest here on AiBURN at some point. This would give me some experience in running a contest for a smaller design blog. I imagine it's more difficult to get a high level of participation on a smaller blog. Maybe I'll run the first contest here when we cross the 2,000 RSS subscriber mark.

This post summarizes what I've learned so far in running design contests online successfully. Let me know if you have any questions.